Tic Tac Toe? A game for babies, now Chess, that’s a mans game.
Let’s install DUCHESS
Duchess,
a chess program running on an IBM 370/168 under the MVS operating system, developed by three graduate students at the Duke University in the 70s, Eric Jensen, Tom Truscott and Bruce Wright. Duchess was one of the strongest programs of its time. In 1977, it was runner up at the Second World Computer Chess Championship in Toronto, behind Chess 4.6 winning from Kaissa, and tied first with Chess 4.6 at the Eighth North American Computer-Chess Championship, runner up due to tie breaking points. At the Third World Computer Chess Championship in Linz 1980, Duchess became third only losing from Belle. Duchess played seven ACM North American Computer Chess Championships from 1974 to 1981.
So first thing we need to do is download DUCHESS
Once that’s done we need to make some changes to the JCL file…
//DUCHESS JOB (),'INSTALL DUCHESS',CLASS=A,MSGCLASS=X,MSGLEVEL=(1,1),
// COND=(0,NE),REGION=4096K,NOTIFY=HERC01
//*
//* ASSUMPTIONS:
//* 1) VOLUME 'PUB000' IS A 3350 AND AVAILABLE FOR USE ON YOUR SYSTEM.
//* 2) 'SYS1.CMDPROC' IS YOUR SYSTEM'S TSO CLIST LIBRARY.
//*
//* INSTRUCTIONS:
//* 1) CHECK JOB CARD DETAILS AND CHANGE AS APPROPRIATE.
//* 2) CHANGE HLQ 'HERC01' TO APPROPRIATE HLQ FOR YOUR SYSTEM.
//* FOR EXAMPLE, YOU MIGHT CHOOSE 'SYS2'.
//* 3) CHANGE TARGET VOLUME SERIAL 'STG005' TO APPROPRIATE VALUE
//* FOR YOUR SYSTEM. DO NOT USE 'PUB000' AS IT IS USED TO STAGE
//* THE TAPE FILES WHICH ARE IN IEHMOVE UNLOADED FORMAT.
//* IEHMOVE WILL ONLY READ THE FIRST FILE ON THE TAPE, WHICH
//* IS WHY THEY MUST BE STAGED.
//* 4) SUBMIT JOB AND MOUNT TAPE AS REQUIRED.
//* 5) READ IMPORTANT MEMBERS OF 'HERC01.DUCHESS.HELP'.
//* 6) ISSUE THE 'DUCHESS' TSO COMMAND TO INVOKE DUCHESS.
//* __________________________________________________________________
The trick here is finding a volume serial number that’s available for use. So lets logon to YOSPOS/380
Exiting to TSO we launch VOLS which shows me all the available volumes
Not knowing what the fuck any of this means I picked MVSRES cause one of my datasets is on that volume. And then uploaded the JCL file.
DUCHESS also comes with an AWS file. This is a TAPE image file that you mount from the console. First you turn on the tape drive
Then we submit the job and some messages come flying across the master console
The job installs DUCHESS then unmounts the tape.
So lets play some chess
Ugh. Looking at the help file I can see the current board:
Luckily there’s an image update so it looks less shitty. It comes as a simple JCL so it’s uploaded then submitted, then you change the DUCHESS member in SYS2.CMDPROC from DUCHESS6 to DUCHESSG
… and…. didn’t work, it’s supposed to look like this:
But it, much like everything else, doesn’t work. But anyway Chess is now installed, fuck you Tic Tac Toe.
HaHa Mainframes 